THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'You won't find a more thrilling winter read this year, or a better line up of writers who have mastered the gothic and ghostly.' SARA COLLINS, Costa Award-winning author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton Featuring new and original tales from: Bridget Collins Sunday Times bestselling author of The Binding | Imogen Hermes Gowar Sunday Times bestselling author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock | Kiran Millwood Hargrave Sunday Times bestselling author of The Mercies | Andrew Michael Hurley Sunday Times bestselling author of The Loney | Jess Kidd International award-winning author of Things in Jars | Elizabeth Macneal Sunday Times bestselling author of The Doll Factory | Natasha Pulley Sunday Times bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street | Laura Purcell Award-winning author of The Silent Companions ______________ Long before Charles Dickens and Henry James popularized the tradition, the shadowy nights of winter have been a time for people to gather together by the flicker of candlelight and experience the intoxicating thrill of a ghost story. Now eight bestselling, award-winning authors - all of them master storytellers of the sinister and the macabre - bring the tradition to vivid life in a spellbinding new collection of original spine-tingling tales. Taking you from the frosty Fens to the wild Yorkshire moors, to the snow-covered grounds of a haunted estate, to a bustling London Christmas market, these mesmerizing stories will capture your imagination and serve as your indispensable companion to the cold, dark nights. So curl up, light a candle, and fall under the spell of winters past . . .

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

Rooted in place, slipping between worlds - a rich collection of unnerving ghosts and sinister histories. Eight authors were given the freedom of their chosen English Heritage site, from medieval castles to a Cold War nuclear bunker. Immersed in the past and chilled by rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories. Also includes a gazetteer of English Heritage properties which are said to be haunted.

The nation's favourite annual guide to the short story, now in its seventh year. Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. Featuring stories by Jay Barnett, Peter Bradshaw, Rosalind Brown, Krishan Coupland, Claire Dean, Niven Govinden, Francoise Harvey, Andrew Michael Hurley, Daisy Johnson, James Kelman, Giselle Leeb, Courttia Newland, Vesna Main, Eliot North, Irenosen Okojie, Laura Pocock, David Rose, Deirdre Shanahan, Sophie Wellstood and Lara Williams.

An atmospheric and unsettling story of the depths of grief found in an ancient farm in northern England, soon to be a major motion picture starring Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark. The worst thing possible has happened. Richard and Juliette Willoughby's son, Ewan, has died suddenly at the age of five. Starve Acre, their house by the moors, was to be full of life, but is now a haunted place. Convinced Ewan still lives there in some form, Juliette seeks the help of the Beacons, a seemingly benevolent group of occultists. Richard, to try and keep the boy out of his mind, has turned his attention to the field opposite the house, where he patiently digs the barren dirt in search of a legendary oak tree. But as they delve further into their grief, both uncover more than they set out to. Starve Acre is a devastating new novel by the author of the prize-winning bestseller The Loney. It is a novel about the way in which grief splits the world in two and how, in searching for hope, we can so easily unearth horror.

The demise of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of independent republics in its wake, have had profound implications for the regions on its periphery. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The essays in this book explore the complex ways in which these republics have found both independence and a new regional identity in their relations with the neighbouring Middle East. Religion, hydro-carbons, transportation needs and ethnic relations with the Gulf States have been rediscovered by the new republics, the study of which provides the basic subject matter for the book. The interests and activities of other regional powers are not excluded, with particular attention being given to the playing out of Russian, Turkish and American interests in countering the perceived rise of political Islam in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER. WINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD. THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016. A brilliantly unsettling and atmospheric debut full of unnerving horror - 'The Loney is not just good, it's great. It's an amazing piece of fiction' Stephen King Two brothers. One mute, the other his lifelong protector. Year after year, their family visits the same sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney, in desperate hope of a cure. In the long hours of waiting, the boys are left alone. And they cannot resist the causeway revealed with every turn of the treacherous tide, the old house they glimpse at its end . . . Many years on, Hanny is a grown man no longer in need of his brother's care. But then the child's body is found. And the Loney always gives up its secrets, in the end. 'This is a novel of the unsaid, the implied, the barely grasped or understood, crammed with dark holes and blurry spaces that your imagination feels compelled to fill' Observer 'A masterful excursion into terror' The Sunday Times

There is to date no comprehensive account of the rhythms of free verse. The main purpose of A Prosody of Free Verse: explorations in rhythm is to fill that gap and begin to provide a systematic approach to describing and analyzing free verse rhythms. Most studies have declared the attempt to write such a prosody as impossible: they prefer to see free verse as an aberrant version of regular metrical verse. They also believe that behind free verse is the 'ghost of metre'. Running against that current, A Prosody of Free Verse bases its new system on additive rhythms that do not fit conventional time signatures. Inspiration is taken from jazz, contemporary music and dance, not only in their systems of notation but in performance. The book argues that twentieth and twenty-first century rhythms in poetry as based on the line rather than the metrical foot as the unit of rhythm , and that larger rhythmic structures fall into verse paragraphs rather than stanzas.

Nearly 120,000 people are in need of healthy organs in the United States. Every ten minutes a new name is added to the list, while on average twenty people die each day waiting for an organ to become available. Worse, our traditional reliance on cadaveric organ donation is becoming increasingly insufficient, and in recent years there has been a decline in the number of living donors as well as in the percentage of living donors relative to overall kidney donors. Some transplant surgeons and policy advocates have responded to this shortage by arguing for the legalization of the sale of organs among living donors. Andrew Flescher objects to this approach by going beyond concerns traditionally cited about social justice, commodification, and patient safety, and moving squarely onto the terrain of discussing what motivates major and costly acts of human selflessness.     What is the most efficacious means of attracting prospective living kidney donors?  Flescher, drawing on literature in the fields of moral psychology and economics, as well as on scores of interviews with living donors, suggests that inculcating a sense of altruism and civic duty is a more effective means of increasing donor participation than the resort to financial incentives. He encourages individuals to spend time with patients on dialysis in order to become acquainted with their plight and, as an alternative to lump-sum payments, consider innovative solutions that positively impact living donor participation that do not undermine the spirit of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. This book not only re-examines the important debate over whether to allow the sale of organs; it is also the first volume in the field to take a close look at alternative solutions to the organ shortage crisis. 

The idea of moral evil has always held a special place in philosophy and theology because the existence of evil has implications for the dignity of the human and the limits of human action. Andrew Michael Flescher proposes four interpretations of evil, drawing on philosophical and theological sources and using them to trace through history the moral traditions that are associated with them. The first model, evil as the presence of badness, offers a traditional dualistic model represented by Manicheanism. The second, evil leading to goodness through suffering, presents a theological interpretation known as theodicy. Absence of badness -- that is, evil as a social construction -- is the third model. The fourth, evil as the absence of goodness, describes when evil exists in lieu of the good -- the "privation" thesis staked out nearly two millennia ago by Christian theologian St. Augustine. Flescher extends this fourth model -- evil as privation -- into a fifth, which incorporates a virtue ethic. Drawing original connections between Augustine and Aristotle, Flescher's fifth model emphasizes the formation of altruistic habits that can lead us to better moral choices throughout our lives. Flescher eschews the temptation to think of human agents who commit evil as outside the norm of human experience. Instead, through the honing of moral skills and the practice of attending to the needs of others to a greater degree than we currently do, Flescher offers a plausible and hopeful approach to the reality of moral evil.

Most of us are content to see ourselves as ordinary people -- unique in ways, talented in others, but still among the ranks of ordinary mortals. Andrew Flescher probes our contented state by asking important questions: How should "ordinary" people respond when others need our help, whether the situation is a crisis, or something less? Do we have a "responsibility," an obligation, to go that extra mile, to act above and beyond the call of duty? Or should we leave the braver responses to those who are somehow different than we are: better somehow, "heroes," or "saints?"

Traditional approaches to ethics have suggested there is a sharp distinction between ordinary people and those called heroes and saints; between duties and acts of supererogation (going beyond the expected). Flescher seeks to undo these standard dichotomies by looking at the lives and actions of certain historical figures -- Holocaust rescuers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, among others -- who appear to be extraordinary but were, in fact, ordinary people. "Heroes, Saints, and Ordinary Morality" shifts the way we regard ourselves in relationship to those we admire from afar -- it asks us not only to admire, but to emulate as well -- further, it challenges us to actively seek the acquisition of virtue as seen in the lives of heroes and saints, to learn from them, a dynamic aspect of ethical behavior that goes beyond the mere avoidance of wrongdoing.

Andrew Flescher sets a stage where we need to think and act, calling us to lead lives of self-examination -- even if that should sometimes provoke discomfort. He asks that we strive to emulate those we admire and therefore allow ourselves to grow morally, and spiritually. It is then that the individual develops a deeper altruistic sense of self -- a state that allows us to respond as the heroes of our own lives, and therefore in the lives of others, when times and circumstance demand that of us.

Joseph Conrad is a key figure in modernist fiction, whose innovative work engages with many of the crucial philosophical, moral and political concerns of the twentieth century. This collection of major critical readings of his work is arranged according to the issues which each critic addresses, issues which are of crucial importance, and in many cases remain controversial, within contemporary literary theory and criticism.
Following an opening section on the critical tradition, indicating how the study of Conrad's work has been politicised since the 1970s, there are sections on 'Narrative, Textuality and Interpretation', 'Imperialism', 'Gender and Sexuality', 'Class and Ideology', and 'Modernity'. Within each section two or three critical excerpts offer contrasting and complementary accounts of the fiction, while the headnotes to each piece and the introduction place these excerpts within the wider critical debate, clarifying for the reader both the theoretical issues and the interpretation of Conrad's fiction. A glossary of terms and a bibliography categorised by critical approach complete a volume which will provide an invaluable resource for students of Conrad and twentieth-century literature as well as other readers of Conrad's work.